I am not resisting reading. I looked up free books on Amazon, and I do not recall seeing anything modern, or anything that interested me. Maybe if someone could recommend one, I could download and read it.
I just found the following article: https://www.universalclass.com/articles/writing/creative-writing/creative-writing-exercises-for-imitation.htm It says that you can do imitation but only as an exercise to develop your own writing style. So, I do not really intend to sound exactly like another author. But I want to learn techniques of cadence, syntax, and rhetoric from well-written prose so that I can develop my own style, not sounding exactly like other authors, but having the qualities that the work of those authors have. Now the exercises mentioned in that article are not even ones that I have even tried for more than five minutes once. I have pretty much never done these exercises. And please let us just forget my efforts to imitate the prose styles of the KJV. It should not even be evident in anything I write, unless of course you recognize some kind of similarity in sound, which you don't. The important matter for critique is not style, but sense, clarity, and flow.
My search for 'free books' at Amazon reveals 809, 219 titles.That's almost a million books, Bubba, and I won't believe you examined each one and rejected them all. Oddly, I don't share the exasperation felt by most here with your multiple posts asking the same question, since I believe good prose does indeed have an identifiable rhythm or cadence, though I have no knowledge of, or interest in, biblical stuff.
If cost is an issue (since you said you're looking for free books only), do you not have a library where you live? They are filled with free books and a librarian could certainly help you find something modern and to your liking.
And that's not counting kobo, ibooks, google play etc etc And in fact most of the frustration with zion stems from him being so bloody helpless - go pick a book you like and read it, then another and another and so on Amazon allows you to search by keyword or genre - none of us are falling into the trap of recommending a book so you can argue about the recommendation (when I say you I mean WFZ not earp)
You'll note that that link is talking about picking two or three of your favourite authors - ergo its taken it as read that you are already widely read
Free books are either going to be self-published (within the last decade) or written over 100 years ago, so I lord knows what your search parameters were.
Go look for AmazonClassics. They won't fulfill the "within the past fifty years" requirement, but they should be well-written and lots of them are free. I await the next reason why this is impossible.
